Why are we using ?
1. is free and open source —saving both you and the university money.
2. Related: Outside of a small group of economists, private- and public-sector employers favor over Stata and most competing softwares.
3. is very flexible and powerful —adaptable to nearly any task, e.g., ’metrics, spatial data analysis, machine learning, web scraping, data cleaning, website building, teaching. I write all my slides, problem sets, and exams in R.
Why are we using ?
4. Related: imposes no artificial restrictions on your amount of observations, variables, memory, or processing power.
5. If you put in the work, 1 you will come away with a valuable and marketable tool.
6. Learning R and the tidyverse will help you to learn other useful tools like SQL, python, etc.